Java installs on Debian/Lenny

Until Debian 5.0, installing full Sun Java JRE or JDK onto Debian was a little bit of a pain, usually requiring some fakeroot fiddling-about and .DEB package creation. Happily now the full Java5 and Java6 packages are available as part of the non-free APT repositories at debian.org under sun-java5-xxx or sun-java6-xxx.

Make sure you have contrib and non-free added to your APT source.list file entries for both deb and deb-src. Default Lenny netinstalls usually only have the main branch. Simply add the words “contrib” and “non-free” at the end of each line starting “deb” or “deb-src” in the /etc/apt/sources.list file; then….

run apt-get update
then
run apt-get install sun-java5-jre
to install the JRE, for example.